(10)Donkey Kong vs (2)Leon Kennedy 2018
Ulti's Analysis Of the 160 gurus this year, nine picked Donkey Kong to win this match. Of the 67 people who played the oracle for this match, only six picked Donkey Kong to win it. To put some perspective on this, more people picked Tidus to win in this spot than Donkey Kong. Fucking Tidus! In retrospect, we should have seen this coming, but people are blinded by the old 'games =/= characters' routine. Resident Evil 4 looked like shit for every single match it was in during the 2015 games contest. It got 59% on Paper Mario, 58% on Fallout New Vegas, and 54% on Metal Gear Solid 2 leading up to the Super Mario RPG match. Want to see something eerie? Look at the percentages for Leon/DK here and then look at what happened when Resident Evil 4 got upset. Super Mario RPG - 27502 55.53% Resident Evil 4 - 22027 44.47% "But Ulti, Donkey Kong is not in Super Mario RPG!" you explain. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-y45gF6UQg Even more eerie is how dominant RE4 looked in Game of the Decade in 2010 compared to 2015. The Resident Evil series decline is real, and Leon Kennedy and Resident Evil 4 can't carry that franchise forever. That game came out in 2005, and Capcom is so desperate to regain lost magic from a decade plus of dumb bullshit that Resident Evil 4 has been released 27 times on every major system since. I wouldn't be surprised if a freemium phone game existed for RE4 at this point. When your parent company completely blows and loses the confidence of consumers, you go back to old habits instead of looking in a mirror and telling yourself to stop being a moron. I feel bad that Leon Kennedy has the sins of Capcom crawling all over his back, but here we are. Here the bleep we are. Shout out to Jim Rome. I feel like if another Nintendo character on DK's level were in his place, more people would have picked that slot to win twice. Let's just hypothetically say Knuckles or Peach were here instead. More people would have picked it. But this is DK, so you get the anti-clutch factor. DK had two obstacles pre-contest. One, he's known for being a choke artist. Two, he drew Tidus in round one in a highly debated match. That's a lot to overcome, and shout out to the 9 people who picked this upset. After the freeze, this match was never even a match. Donkey Kong just went out there and beat Leon Kennedy's ass. Even the trends looked identical to the RE4 upset. This would set up, of all things, Donkey Kong vs Vivi. Again. Could DK, boosted by finally being clutch, some great recent Country games, and Smash good will finally take down his nemesis? lol no As for where Resident Evil goes from here, who the hell knows. Capcom has sabotaged all of their own brands and it will take a long time to recover. The match pic crybabies should look at Capcom or Konami's business practices if they want to know what actual sabotage looks like, just for the record. Safer777's Analysis This is the strangest result of the contest so far for me. Donkey Kong defeated Leon almost as much as he defeated Tidus. And you know how many people saw that? We had around 85% of the Gurus having Leon advancing to Round 3! Hell more people picked Tidus than Donkey Kong to reach Round 3! I repeat, more people had Tidus beating Leon, than DK beating Leon! So what happened? Okay DK is in Smash. Fine. And he had some games in the last few years. Okay. Leon of course has nothing in the last years. But here is the thing. The instant RE 2 remake was announced I see it in the PS 4 top 10 message boards all the time. And so many articles talking about it. So many videos! So much hype!Also RE 4 recently got announced for the Switch too! And in both of these games Leon is the protagonist. So it is not that people forgot who Leon is. But DK winning this much? Seriously? As I said around 5.5% of the Gurus had DK advancing. So I don't know what to say. Maybe DK is a really strong character now? Or is Leon and Tidus that weak? Or a combination of both? Anyways an Icon won so that is cool I guess. Icon's winnning are always good. Of course the prediction percentage was bad, but not that bad actually. More than 38% so I guess we were fooled or something. Tsunami's Analysis Wonderful. Now this is exactly what the grumpy old folks of Board 8 are looking for! This was an upset, plain and simple, and there was nothing fishy about it. It wasn't some newcomer doing unexpected things; it was an established veteran beating another established veteran when we all expected otherwise. Just 5.625% of Gurus picked Donkey Kong to win this match, though to be fair, only 32.5% even picked him to beat Tidus. Yes, we get nice round percentages for this, because the total number of Gurus was 160, a number with 2 and 5 as its only prime factors. Since we work in base 10, these are the only prime numbers that will result in a terminating decimal. I suppose when you look at it that way, the Gurus were giving DK a better chance against Leon than they were giving Tidus, as despite having over twice as many picks to reach Round 2 he had not even 1.5 times as many picks to reach Round 3 (Leon was a unanimous choice to reach Round 2, so I don't even need to go deeper to know that this is solely based on the potential matchup with Leon). So this was definitely an lolGurus moment. "But wait!" you say. "The casuals were held under 50% on this one, too!" Yes, they were, and it's certainly possible that Leon was the favorite there, too, but it's quite unlikely. DK's Round 1 prediction percentage: 66.99% Leon's Round 1 prediction percentage: 72.69% DK's Round 2 prediction percentage: 38.06% This means roughly 56.82% of brackets that took DK to Round 2 continued to take him to Round 3. Not a heavy favorite, but a favorite nonetheless. If you assume little to no correlation between DK > Tidus pickers and Leon > Dragonborn pickers, you'd expect only about 48.7% of brackets to even have both of those correct. If you further assume that the 56.82% ratio is also applicable specifically to DK-Leon pickers, you're left with just over 21% of brackets specifically picking Leon > DK. Leaving Leon in need of over 18% of brackets to have Leon > Tidus, when as per our previous numbers, DK being a bit over a 2-1 favorite over Tidus means that under 24.5% of brackets even have Leon-Tidus. Now this does make a lot of assumptions. If there is in fact a surprisingly strong correlation, it's quite possible that an inordinate amount of DK picks were actually DK > Dragonborn, and that both Leon > Tidus and Leon > DK were more common picks than Tidus > Leon and DK > Leon. After all, it is at least mathematically possible that fewer than 40% of brackets had the correct matchup (in the event that no brackets got both matches wrong.) But chances are, DK was the slight favorite here. Given that Vivi had been the casuals' underdog in each of his first two matches with DK (conclusively confirmable because they were both Round 1 matches), fans of low prediction percentages were eagerly awaiting Round 3. (Final numbers note: Just 8.96% of Oracle pickers sided with DK here, so it's not like we saw this coming by match time and adjusted accordingly. This was an upset through and through.) Category:2018 Contest Matches